The present invention relates generally to educational games. More particularly, the invention relates to educational games that teach children about physical concepts such as speed and relative velocity.
Commercially available educational games have been used in various settings to teach a wide variety of information and concepts. Various board games, for example, use trivia or directed questions to educate users on various topics. Physical concepts such as gravity and velocity, are not readily amenable to such methods of teaching. Textual presentation of such concepts lack the environmental interaction that can provide a student a conceptual link that demonstrative presentation can give. Further, reading or listening to an explanation of a concept requires the student to perform the potentially difficult task of digesting the text into a form that has meaning to that student.
Some toys take a step toward teaching some physical concepts. Teaching speed and velocity, for example, are taught by introducing a relative motion with respect to the user. An example of such a toy is a car race track. The user then controls the speed of the car over the track thereby investigating and learning in an abstract sense the concepts of speed and acceleration. A problem with such toys is that the speed of the car is not known or given in absolute terms, and its context is always the same. Its scale is small, and does not allow the user to participate physically in the motion of the car to get a deep physical sense of speed and its consequences of covering a perceptible distance over time.
Currently available full size toys and games have not been used to teach such physical concepts. Examples of such games and toys are found on an average playground. A swing set, for example, can be used to introduce a relative motion to a user where the user oscillates with respect to the earth. The speed of the user is not easily gauged nor can it be controlled beyond the rudimentary manual control of the user. Therefore, the user has no way to ascertain speed against a controlled speed in order to learn the physical concept.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide a game that teaches physical concepts such as speed and velocity.
It is another object to the invention to provide a game that is fully scaled such that motion within the game can be accurately applied to the user.
It is still another object of the invention to portray velocity, or other physical concepts, in such a way that the user can investigate the concepts in a playful way singularly or in groups.
These and other objects of the invention will be obvious and will appear hereinafter.